Disclaimer: Kripke's play pen, I'm just messing with his toys.
A/N: I've worked on this story for almost a year, I just really wanted Jess to feel like more than a symbol or a cut out—because one of the amazing things, to me, about the show is how so much of the story can revolve around characters like Jess and Mary who are never really developed for the audience. Anyway, this is my attempt at developing that relationship between Sam and Jess. Read, enjoy, let me know what you think.
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She looked him in the eye.
"I'm Jess." She bellowed over the music, smiling politely and waving the bottle of water in her hand. And Sam for his part stood silent, memorized not by the golden skin perfectly displayed in her teal top or the shiny arch of her full lips as she smiled, but by the fact that she was looking him in the eye. Taller than 6'0 since tenth grade, Sam couldn't stop himself from being impressed by her. "You're tall." He mumbled back and she must have heard him because she laughed. Not the nervous laugh that Sam had spent the last five years perfecting, it was a belly laugh that took Sam back to the backseat of a muscle car while his brother did something truly insane.
"So says the giant."
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Becky passed him a number the next Monday. "Call her." She said, an angelic grin that could have struck down cupid widening across her face. Sam remembered back water towns were Dean introduced him to stacked waitresses just to make him blush.
"Maybe." He replied without promising, taking the blue post-it from Becky's fingers and sticking it to one of it his notebooks.
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Jess called him three hours later. "I know this is weird," she said, "but Becky gave me your number and she said you wanted me to have it but Becky can be full of shit sometimes so it's totally cool if you have no idea who this is." It was one long exhale of breath that whistled in Sam's ear and the grin that came to his face was part embarrassment, part amusement. He made a mental note to fry Becky later, but laughed into the receiver. "Sounds like a set up." He said, smiling though there was no one to see it.
"Sounds like our Becky."
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He learned her.
Learned that Jess loved black licorice and granny smith apples and baked on random weekends. That she talked during movies and swore more than him and that she hadn't had a boyfriend since some engineering major who couldn't appreciate literature her first year. She would rub her elbow when she was nervous and her hair smelled clean, reminded Sam of the generic soap Dad always bought.
She called Sam's lame joke, played soccer on Saturdays and sang along to Dido, Johnny Cash and the Temptations. She cried at the end of Say Anything.
He learned that she could wear three inch heels, tower over Sam, and laughed about it.
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Sam had two finals left before finishing up his second year and Jess kissed him in the library, somewhere between women's studies and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. She just tilted her head and suddenly he couldn't breath without taking in a lungful of gingersnaps and she tasted like cotton candy lip gloss—too sweet and too sticky—and he never wanted to let her go. He wrapped his arms around her waist, pressed her closer, and she was right here, with him, arms around his shoulders and just perfect.
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She invited him over for the summer, back to San Diego where the air was dry and the sun was strong ("Come one, I promise I'll take you Comic Con."), but Sam shook his head and said he couldn't, no thank you. And she hugged him and told him she'd call and kissed him again and Sam was afraid to say goodbye.
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Junior year started and majors were declared and Jess was taking a heavy course load centered on turn of century literature. She made him read e.e. cummings and introduced him to John Hughes, made him read Atwood and Huxley and Orwell, argued plausibility versus sensationalism. She would ramble about syntax and meaning, symbolism and phrase (and he never laughed harder than when she went on for twenty minutes about why Hemmingway was a shitty writer).
She told him about her mother who baked and her father who gardened and her brother Lucas who skate-boarded and her sister Sara who danced. She told him what it was like to live in one place your entire life, about things that went back all the years of your life—not guns and moldy books but furniture and porch swings—, told him about things like prom and Spanish club and Student government. "I was a dork" she said with a wry smile and when she'd told him everything she could think of she asked about him about himself.
Sam told her about Dean.
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They moved in together after New Year and Jess was so happy she insisted they'd repaint the living room and the bedroom and wallpaper the kitchen. "Like adults." She bought lamps and blinds and 100 count sheets. She walked around bare foot and Sam learned what her legs felt like in between shaves. They mixed their laundry together. He made breakfast on Sundays and she would try to make dinner and they'd end up eating Mac and Cheese but Sam didn't care. And maybe, just maybe, he was in love—with his life, with her, with the possibility of it all.
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They'd been together almost seven months (living together for one) when Sam got the call. Caleb's voice was tired over a country worth of static but all Sam needed to hear was Dean and critical condition for him to get the point.
Jess gave him the one-seventy needed for a plane ticket to Nebraska and told him everything would be alright (she wanted to go but he wouldn't let her miss her first big test in one of her major classes, couldn't explain all the details that made emergency rooms and alias everyday occurrences Sam could still feel). By the time Sam got there, the nurse at the desk informed him that Mr. Harrison could be seen by immediate family only (and the Stanford ID reading Sam Winchester was getting him no where fast). He stayed until Caleb came out to see him and told him the doctors said he'd make it—said he was gonna have to stay off the leg and go easy on his lungs for a while, and damn, wouldn't Dean just love that?—then got a plane back to California. Jess didn't save anything when he got home and knocked over a chair and refused to say a word.
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"You're being evasive." Jess would say, her brow furrowed, lips drawn together in the determined line. "You can talk to me." Jess would say, hands on his face, lips, soft and light, resting against his chin. "I'm right here." Jess would say, sitting across the table from him, munching on the grilled cheese sandwich he'd made for her (she always said he made the best grilled cheese but the truth was that that was all he could make, because Dean had always been responsible for meals when there was a place to cook at all).
"I know." Sam would say because it was the only truth he could share with her.
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Jess could be oddly domestic. Cookies on Tuesday nights and laundry on Thursdays—she always folded her clothes at the table, made neat piles out of things like underwear and socks and t-shirts—and lie ins on Sunday mornings, paper passed back and forth. She always did the crossword puzzles.
It was infectious, but Sam could never forget about the sawed off rifle under the floorboards, the knife behind the wardrobe, the sigils, drawn in chalk, hidden by the wallpaper they'd chosen together.
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He went home with her for a week that summer. He had a job waiting for him starting the second week of June, but her parents wanted to meet him—she had smiled against his ear and played her fingers against his neck as she told him—so he went.
Her mother hugged him at the door and her father gave him a once over, asked for his major, his occupation, asked what his parents thought.
"Dad", Jess cut him off before Sam had to answer the third, "stop trying to scare him off. He's staying." And she was smiling while she said it but her hand was squeezing his, as though it were a question.
He squeezed hers back wordless and hoped she understood it wasn't.
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Becky put the idea in his head. "You know, my parents got married right out of college."
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He had a plan. Become lawyer. Be with Jess. Fix things with Dad—not go back, he never wanted to go back, but that didn't mean he never wanted to speak to his father again.
He had a plan (maybe he should have known better).
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She told him she loved him on her birthday, a little drunk and very happy. "I love you a lot." She clarified, wrapping her arms around his neck and leaning into him completely. And he loved that he could kiss her without craning his neck, loved that he could make her happy. "A lot a lot" she added in between kisses and Sam just smiled against her mouth and agreed with every kiss.
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He made her cry once. He probably made her cry more than that, but he could only ever remember that one time when she'd left him, when he snapped because she was asking for too much. "I can't Jess, okay. I just can't tell you all of it. You wouldn't understand." How could see? She wasn't supposed to understand what it was like to wait for your father to return every time he walked out the front door and the sickening feeling he wouldn't. She wasn't supposed to understand being raised by strangers and conmen and hunters, men who lived without attachments to anything but the hunt. She was never supposed to understand watching your brother bleed and curse while your father splashed holy water onto a black dog bite.
But she reacted to his words like a blow, walked away from him and slammed the front door behind her.
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When she came back he apologized. He told her that he was sorry, that he trusted her. "It's just complicated." He said, looking her in the eye and trying to find the most truthful lie to abate her anger, wondered how long he could live behind excuses.
"You could always explain." She said softly, her eyes still angry.
"I don't want to scare you away." He said at last, because it was a complete truth, and she nodded, once, and took his hand.
"Don't worry about."
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He never told her about the fire. So when the dreams started coming, he didn't tell her about them either.
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Becky invited them away for Halloween weekend. "I know a guy who'll be throwing the best party. Seriously good stuff without any competition for service at the bar." But Jess said no, said Sam had an interview Monday and they couldn't afford to be nursing the sort of hangover a weekend with some of Becky's better financed friends would get them.
"Your loss," Becky said, flashing her brilliant smile, "Guess I'll see you losers Monday."
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She laughed when he tried to help her unzip the nurse costume, giggled when he brushed his fingers along her ribs. "How did you find this thing?" he asked, his fingers finally closing on the flat head of the zipper. He pinched her side. She looked at him, eyeliner smudged, red lipstick bleeding a little at the corners of her mouth. She laughed again, a drunken hiccup that rang like a giggle, breathless and slow.
Later, he kissed her, pressed her back into their soft sheets—they smelled like fabric softener and Jess' shampoo—kissed her eyelids and her cheeks and the soft side of her mouth. "You're so beautiful." He told her, feeling silly and stupid and so (fucking happy, interview on Monday, Jess for forever, and this might work, this thing called his life) content that he could just lie there with her for the rest of his life.
"You are too." She says with a smile, threading her fingers through his hair.
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He dreamt Jess was burning, could see her face even as the fire spread farther, ate more of her away. She opened her mouth—to scream, to cry, to beg for help—and all that came out was an exhale of breath. There was more fire. He woke up to Jess pressed against his back, one leg curling around his, her hand flat against the space between his shoulder blades. He wanted to roll over, wanted to grab her close and keep her safe from the images inside his head but Jessed pressed closer and he couldn't move away from her (he never wanted to).
Her breath was warm on the back of his neck and he slowed his breathing to match hers, in and out, just like Dad always taught them to regulate their breathing during drills, and fell back to sleep still trying to match their breathing.
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The End
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